RKNet Blog... Thing

(Edit: Despite being the “code” view, the wordpress post editor function still has WYSIWYG properties at times, like automatically inserting line breaks even if it means breaking apart an existing element incorrectly, as was shown above for a while. Should be all better now though! )

I don’t know about you but I love the fact that my friends listen to notably different stuff. It means more opportunities to discover new things. Also, what a great example of a simple chart indicating massive amounts of information.

If you’re on Last.FM, add me! I love to find out what music drives people.

Looks like I had spoken too soon about URLtea being back in it to win it.

An astute commenter on my previous “URLTea Dead” post just tipped me off to the site being dead, again.

Below is the text I got when visting the main site.

Site Temporarily Unavailable
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.

error id: “bad_httpd_conf”

Of course no word from them using Twitter. Although funnily enough when I went to check their twitter profile to confirm…

Another Twitter outage. Nothing new. Still, at least with the screen (as shown in the image above) I was given upon hitting the site, I was immediately aware of the issue, and was given some kind of assumed reassurance that the Twitter team would be working to repair the issue. URLTea’s “error page”? Not so much.

Once again I wish to invite the URLtea operators to touch base with their users, and let us know about outages, and the future of URLtea. With a growing number of URL-shortening services out there, it becomes less and less apparent why I or anyone else should use URLtea. If you guys are interested in building a service, or a company, which people feel comfortable sticking with and recommending, it is in your best interests to communicate once in a while.

Twitter is notorious for outages at this point, but they’re discussing it publicly and making it clear that they are working to fix these issues. Dreamhost has issues regularly, which they report to customers via RSS and other direct-to-customer methods (i.e. not just posting it up on the site and assuming people will go there to read). Rackspace has blown up a couple times, too, and they sent out a slew of direct-to-customer emails. The reason these companies still get the attention that they do is because they respond to these incidents.

So what’s the scoop, URLtea?

I was poking around for more information on Liber AL Vel Legis earlier and found SourceryForge.org (I c wut they did thar). A little further sniffing about turned up this really neat Tarot spread generator. Though still under construction, it offers four types of readings: single card, 3 card relating to influence, 3 card relating to time, and a celtic cross spread. (The celtic cross spread function is the part that’s still being worked on.)

It allows you to choose whether or not cards may be shown as reversed, it allows you to restrict your results to Major Arcana only, also. Each card gets linked to the appropriate page in the SourceryForge wiki so you can read more about it as you choose. And of course a code generator so you can embed it into your blog like I have done above.

Looks like a neat little tool, and probably useful for those who are making a study of Tarot and cannot afford a deck, or are familiar with Tarot and wish to see how a digital deck holds up to their more traditional experiences.

URLTea used to be my favorite URL shortening service. Emphasis on used to be. For (and I’m guessing here) I’d say the better part of a month, every time I have attempted to make a shortened URL or visit the site, it’s been coming up error, 404, you’re looking for what again?

Does anyone know what became of URLtea? Their last post to Twitter was 6 months ago. Their Google code page doesn’t have any news. Alex King seemed to predict its downfall but none of the commenters have anything helpful to add.

URLtea creators and primary supporters! Where have you gone? Will you be bringing the site back?

I liked your tea towel background and your awesome bookmarklet tool. Don’t let me suffer in a sea of plain jane tinyurls!

Created by OnePlusYou

I’d be interested to see how this test really works. I should check my log files for some kind of crawler. The results came back surprisingly fast, given the amount of pages here (especially when you take into account the tags and categories). I’m inclined to say that this percentage is probably fairly accurate, but I strongly question the method by which the data was obtained.

I mean, what exactly constitutes cussing? Which words count? There is of course Carlin’s Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television, but there are so many other words that are considered cuss words by various groups of people.

Oh well. Point is, we here at RKNet aren’t afraid to fuckin’ curse once in a while when we damn well feel like it. Without further ado, I give you Carlin’s 7 Words. 10 minutes of unabashed linguistic analysis.

Kind of hard to believe he was Mister Conductor on Shining Time Station for years, isn’t it?

gawkermedia - like crack
I ate a hot pocket earlier
it collapsed part of my soul
cult leadership is tough with so many alternatives to be had.
I’m contemplating talking about a serious subject
that came to mind through a dubious link
conspiracy theory is weird, the truth is usually weirder.
Hey how many five year olds can you beat up? No really.
oh and don’t bother with the booze test. broke every time I tried it.

Who needs photoshop when you can just use one of a bajillion image generators littered throughout the net?
Case in point: AddLetters.com’s Disneyland Sign Generator.

Was the People Mover in Disneyland or Disney World?

Tonight or tomorrow I will be upgrading to Wordpress 2.3. What this means for you as a reader is: mo-betta tags and a faster blog.

It may also mean more authors! With the addition of a feature called “pending review”, it means I can invite others to share this blog space and still maintain the RKNet quality you know (I hope) and love (I hope!). (Also, if you have an interest in contributing let me know!) I hope to step up with providing more constant content, and more original content, and having other authors would help immensely in that.

This might also mean some issues, since I’m a little fuzzy on the whole wordpress update process, but I’ve got some assistance and I’m hoping for the best!

Amanita Design, responsible for the two beautiful flash games: Samarost and Samarost 2, are now working on a full-length adventure game! According to the tantalizing site We expect to release the game in the 2nd half of 2008.

Right now the site only has the basic announcement, 2 tantalizing bits of delicious art, and a forum. The forum appears to be a little empty right now. I would strongly encourage anyone who enjoyed the Samarost games to pop by and give the Amanita Design team a word of thanks! Besides, the more talk generated in the forums, the more they might feel inclined to drop a few more hints of what’s to come! Nudge nudge, wink wink.

At Typorganism there’s a fascinating little tool that will take JPEGs sized 60×50 pixels and turn them into either letter or block style ASCII art in either color or black and white.

There are five sample faces you can play with to get a feel for what the tool can do: 3 male faces, one female face and one cat face.

There is also a picture upload option. I played with this tool for a moment and of course I had the perfect sample picture to test the tool’s limits.

I found the “Generate HTML” option slightly desceptive. Selecting this option with the color and square options will open a new window with a JPEG output of the Flash-generated image. Which is great for saving, but not “true” ASCII. However, if you opt for the letters option, this tool will definitely deliver!

Forgive the display, I can’t quite make it work the way I want. Below the cut to hide my shame.
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